Paulbert Fillius Pontifex III, Esq
Paulbert Fillius Pontifex III, Esquire was the founder of LUX, the developer of LUXos and Pontiscript, and a pawn of the Nemesis Fungus. His work was instrumental in the creation of the present Fungal crisis that is Operation Quickening. Pre-LUX Pontifex was born to his father, Paulbert II, and mother, Jolizabeth Lee Pontifex (née Habsburg) in Greenwich, Massachusetts in 1929. He led a life of extravagant wealth, but was the heir to an unhappy marriage. On April 18, 1941, his parents had a marriage-ending argument following a screening of the James Stewart musical comedy Pot o’ Gold in the lobby of a United Artists theater in Boston. Blaming UA, which would later become Regal, for his broken home, young Paulbert vowed to destroy them with "Dare I say, a Roundly More Gay Experience than those oafs at United Artists.", a slogan that would later transform into “110% More Fun Than A Regal.” 1947 was a crucible year for young Paulbert. Months reaching his age of majority, the Pontifex family fortune was reduced to ashes by coups in Romania and Thailand as well as the collapse of the cotton undergarments industry after WW2 and 1946's dissolution of the League of Nations. Pontifex, undeterred, made his way west to Hollywood, his resolve expressed to a friend, "I’ll start in the damned mail room if I have to!" Unaccustomed to modern business practices such as personally doing work rather than commanding servants to do it, his career remained stalled until his disappearance. According to documents obtained from sources with close knowledge of the event, on June 4, 1951, police responding to a smell complaint found his apartment abandoned, filled with esoteric books including the works of John Murray Spear and cryptic encoded journals not yet fully decoded to this day. These journals include recurring images of a great eye and detailed diagrams of the human brain, the limbic system highlighted and "MORE FUN" scrawled in an unsteady hand. Neighbor interviews revealed young Pontifex became progressively stranger and more secluded over the last 3 years. Rumors abounded of his activities late in the night. 1969 and 1970 saw intelligence reports of a man matching Pontifex's description overseeing the production and opening of movie theaters in the USSR, North Korea, and the People's Republic of China. Clearly fully suborned by the Nemesis Fungus and indoctrinated into the Cult of Ibis by this time, he contributed vastly to its experiments in media-based transmission in its isolated test-bed behind the iron curtain. President of LUX Days after Regal Cinema's founding in 1989, Pontifex reappeared, incorporating LUX in North Dakota. Work immediately began retrofitting and expanding a mothballed missile silo for the eventual creation and installation of LUXos in the LUX Vault. North Dakota remains LUXos's stronghold to this day. Paulbert III oversaw renovations while developing Pontiscript and initial designs for LUXos. On New Year's Eve of 1999, LUX hosted a mandatory corporate executive's party at Theater 0. Internal documents suggest Paulbert II would be in attendance, and there would be an "ascendance ceremony" in his honor. Nothing has been heard from the now-sealed Detention Complex since that night. All other LUX executives across the United States, also at corporate parties, disappeared without a trace, surely the work of Fungus-controlled FUNbots. Most likely, he participated in a sort of ritual suicide as conducted sometimes by those who are so consumed by the fungus that they lose their minds and believe that in death they will be united with the Nemesis in spirit. What is most disturbing about this believe is that, due to ultra-psychic exoluminal bonding, they might not be entirely wrong, though having your soul be keelhauled by an immense psychic entity through meta-consciousness for all time must be like a living hell. You can almost pity them. Almost.